Revolutions are endemic to tech culture. A new group comes along and wonders why the last generation built something so complex, and they set out to tear down the old institutions. After a bit, they begin to realize why all of the old institutions were so complex, and they start implementing the features once again.

We’re seeing this in the NoSQL world, as some of the projects start adding back things that look like transactions, schemas, and standards. This is the nature of progress. We tear things down only to build them back again. NoSQL is finished with the first phase of the revolution and now it’s time for the second one.

I’ve read an interesting article about NoSQL databases at infoworld. The article explains how the revolution of NoSQL databases have emerged and what the current situation from the perspective of solution development is. I think the article touches on important issues where NoSQL databases have inherent weaknesses besides their advantages, and every solution architect or developer must be aware of those issues.

You may know that System.Security.Cryptography for Compact Framework lacks many cryptography algorithms compared to the desktop .Net Framework (2005 and later). In a project we have needed SHA512 encryption on Windows CE and we have found /cfAes library which provides almost all of the crypto functionality of .NET Framework. We are grateful to the author for sharing the class library.

The following table displays a comparison between the versions of .Net Framework with respect to the support for different crypyography algorithms (X means that it is supported, 0 means partially supported).

Every time I buy a new PC, either desktop or notebook, its hard disk capacity is larger than the previous one even though the total price of the PC is about equal. The same thing may apply for the other components of the PC like main memory capacity and CPU power, but hard disk capacity is something very different.

Matthew Komorowski has collected hard drive capacity/price data and created the graph below:

Source: http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte

Komorowski has also drawn a conclusion about the capacity/cost trend as:

Over the last 30 years, space per unit cost has doubled roughly every 14 months (increasing by an order of magnitude every 48 months)